Bennett Foddy
Description Bennett Foddy is an American game developer, know for games like QWOP and Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. He is also an instructor at the NYU Game Center. Gameplay In Getting Over It, Bennett Foddy provides voiceover during the course of gameplay. Quotes from him include talking about the design of the game, the nature of frustration, and cultural philosophy. Voice Lines (Progressing) *''"There's no feeling more intense than starting over." '' *''"If you've deleted your homework the day before it was due, as I have," '' *''"Or if you left your wallet at home and you have to go back, after spending an hour in the commute," '' *''"If you won some money at the casino and then put all your winnings on red, and it came up black," '' *''"If you got your best shirt dry-cleaned before a wedding and then immediately dropped food on it," '' *''"If you won an argument with a friend and then later discovered that they just returned to their original view," '' *''"Starting over is harder than starting up." '' *''"If you're not ready for that, like if you've already had a bad day"'' *''"Then what you're about to go through might be too much."'' *''"Feel free to go away and come back. I'll be here."'' *''"Alright, thanks for coming with me on this trip. I'll understand if you have to take a break at any point..."'' *''"Just find a safe place to stop, and quit the game." '' *''"Don't worry, I'll save your progress, always. Even your mistakes." '' *''"This game is a homage to a free game that came out in 2002, titled 'Sexy Hiking'" '' *''"The author of that game was Jazzuo, a mysterious Czech designer who was known at the time as the father of B-Games."'' *''"B-Games are rough assemblages of found objects, Designers slap them together very quickly and freely, and they're often too rough and unfriendly to gain much following."' *"They're built more for the joy of building them than as polished products."'' *''"In a certain way Sexy Hiking is the perfect embodiment of a B-Game. It's built almost entirely out of found and recycled parts, and it's one of the most unusual and unfriendly games of its time."'' *''"In it, your task is to simply drag yourself up a mountain with a hammer" '' *''"The act of climbing, in the digital world or in real life, has certain essential properties that gives the game it's flavor."'' *''"No amount of forward progress is guaranteed; some cliffs are to sheer or too slippery."'' *''"And the player is constantly, unremittingly in danger of falling and losing everything."'' *''"Anyway when you start Sexy Hiking, you're standing next to a (this dead) tree, which blocks the way to the entire rest of the game."'' *''"It might take you an hour to get over that tree. A lot of people never got past it. You prod and poke at it, exploring the limits of your reach and strength, trying to find a way up."'' *''"There's a sense of truth in that lack of compromise."'' *''"Most obstacles in videogames are fake - you can be completely confident in your ability to get through them, once you have the correct method or the correct equipment, or just by spending enough time."'' *''"In that sense, every pixelated object in Sexy Hiking is real."'' *''"The obstacles in Sexy Hiking are unyielding, and that makes the game uniquely frustrating."'' *''"But I'm not sure Jazzuo intended to make a frustrating game - the frustration is just essential to the act of climbing and it's authentic to the process of building a game about climbing."'' *''"A funny thing happened to me as I was building this mountain: I'd have an idea for a new obstacle, and I'd build it, test it, and... it would usually turn out to be unreasonably hard. But I couldn't bring myself to make it easier."'' *''"It already felt like my inability to get past the new obstacle was my fault as a player, rather than as the builder."'' *''"Imaginary mountains build themselves from our efforts to climb them, and it's our repeated attempts to reach the summit that turns those mountains into something real."'' *''"When you're building a videogame world you're building with ideas, And that can be like working with quick-set cement. You mold your ideas into a certain shape that can be played with, and in the process of playing with them they begin to harden and set until theyre immutable, like rock."'' *''"At that point you can't change the world - not without breaking it into pieces and starting fresh with new ideas."'' *''"For years now people have been predicting that games would soon be made out of prefabricated objects, bought into a store and assembled into a world."'' *''"For the most part, that hasn't happened, because the objects in the stores are trash. I don't mean they look bad or they're badly made, although a lot of them are. I mean they're trash in the way that food becomes trash as soon as you put it in the sink."'' *''"Things are made to be consumed in a certain context, and once the moment is gone they transform into garbage. In the context of technology those moments pass by in seconds."'' *''"Over time we've poured more and more refuse into this vast digital landfill we call the internet. It now vastly outnumbers and outweighs the things that are fresh and untainted and unused." *"When everything around us is cultural trash, trash becomes the new medium, the lingua franca of the digital age." *"You can build culture out of trash, but only trash culture: B-ganes, B-movies, B-music, B-philosophy." *"Maybe this is what digital culture is." *"A monstrous mountain of trash, the ash-heap of creativity's fountain." *"A landfill with everything we ever thought of in it(,) Grand, infinite, and unsorted." *"There's 3D models of breakfast(,) gen-xers' fanfic novels(,) scanned magazines, green-screen Shia LeBoeuf(,) banned snuff scenes on liveleak(,) facebook's got lifelike bots with unbranded adverts, and candid shots of Kanye(,) and Taylor Swift mashups(,) car crash epic fail gifs(,) Russian dash cam vids(,) discussions of McRibs(,) discarded, forgotten, unrecycled, muddled, rotten, untitled." *"Everything's fresh for about six seconds until some newer thing beckons and we hit refresh. And there's years of persevering Dissapearing into the pile, Out of sight." *"In this context, it's tempting to make friendly content... That's gentle, that lets you churn through it but not earn it." *"Why make something demanding if it just gets piled up in the landfill Filed in with the bland things?" *"When games were new, they wanted a lot from you. Daunting you, taunting you, resetting and delaying you. Players played stoically. Now everyone's turned off by that. They want to burn through it quickly, a quick fix for the fickle, some tricks for the clicks of the feckless. But that's not you, you're an acrobat, you could swallow a baseball bat." *"Now I know, most likely you're watching on YouTube or Twitch while some dude with 10 million views does it for you, Like a baby bird being fed chewed-up food. That's culture too." *"But on the off-chance that you're playing this, what I'm saying is: Trash is disposable but maybe it doesn't have to be approachable." *"What's the feeling like? Are you stressed? I guess you don't hate it if you got this far, feeling frustrated it's underrated." *"An orange is sweet juicy fruit locked inside a bitter peel. That's not how I feel about a challenge. I only want the bitterness, Its coffee, its grapefruit, its licorice." *"It feels like we're closer now, composer and climber, Designer and user. You could have refused but you didn't, There was something in you that was hidden, That chose to continue." *"It means a lot to me that you've come this far, Endured this much. Every wisecrack, every insensitivity, every setback that you've forgiven me is a kingly gift you've given me." *"We have the same taste, You and I. It's not ambition. It's ambition's opposite. An obdurate mission to taste defeat. You'll feel bad if you win, so I put this snake in for you." *"Have you thought about who you are in this? Are you the man in the pot, Diogenes? Are you the mans hand? Are you the top of the hammer? I think not. Where you move the hammer may not follow, nor the man, nor the mans hand. In this you're his WILL, his intent. The embodied resolve in his uphill ascent." *"Now you've conquered the ice cliff, The platforms the church and rectory, the living room and the factory, the playground and the construction site, the granite rocks, and the lakeside. You've learned to hike. There's nowhere left to go but up, And in a moment I'll shut up, but let me say, I'm glad you came." *"I dedicate this game to you, the one who came this far. I give it to you with all my love." Quotes Upon failing and falling, Bennett will, from time to time, say a quote to do with failure or falling down; *"Can I see another's woe, and not be in sorrow too? Can I see another's grief, and not seek for kind relief?" -William Blake'' *''"In the end, we only regret the chances we didn't take." -Lewis Caroll'' *''"You cannot now believe that you will ever feel better. But this is not true. You are sure to be happy again. Knowing this, truly believing it, will make you less miserable now." -Abraham Lincoln'' *''"I stand amid the roar of a surf-tormented shore, And I hold within my hand grains of the golden sand. How few! Yet how they creep through my fingers to the deep, while I weep - while I weep! O God, can I not grasp them with a tighter clasp? O God, can I not save one from the pitiless wave? Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?" -Edgar Allen Poe'' *''"Do not stand at my grave and cry; I am not there. I did not die." -Mary Elizabeth Frye'' *''"The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That's the deal." -C.S. Lewis'' *''"The soul would have no rainbow had the eyes no tears." - John Vance Cheney'' *''"To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering." -Friedrich Nietzsche'' *''"This thing that we call 'failure' is not the falling down, but the staying down." -Mary Pickford'' *''"Don't hate the player, hate the game." -Ice T'' *"There are no regrets in life, just lessons." -Jennifer Aniston *''Your failure here is a metaphor. To learn for what, please resume climbing." -Rob Dubbin'' *''"Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone; For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth, but has trouble enough of its own." -Ella Weaver Wilcox'' *''"Better by far you should forget and smile than that you should remember and be sad." -Christina Rosetti'' *''"Something filled up my heart with nothing, someone told me not to cry. Now that I’m older, my heart is colder, I can see that it’s a lie." -The Arcade Fire'' *''"When to the sessions of sweet silent thought. I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing sought, and with old woes new ail my dear time’s waste." -William Shakespeare, Sonnet XXX'' *''"If you try to please audiences, uncritically accepting their tastes, it can only mean that you have no respect for them." -Andrei Tarkovsky'' *''"LIFE is a mosaic of pleasure and pain - grief is an interval between two moments of joy. Peace is the interlude between two wars. You have no rose without a thorn; the diligent picker will avoid the pricks and gather the flower." -Sathya Sai Baba'' *''"Pain has an element of blank; It cannot recollect. When it began, or if there were. A day when it was not. It has no future but itself, Its infinite realms contain. Its past, enlightened to perceive. New periods of pain." -Emily Dickinson'' *''"Sorrow is my own yard where the new grass flames as it has flamed often before but not with the cold fire that closes round me this year." -William Carlos Williams'' *''"The mountain seems no more a soulless thing, But rather as a shape of ancient fear, In darkness and the winds of Chaos born. Amid the lordless heavens' thundering- A Presence crouched, enormous and austere, Before whose feet the mighty waters mourn." -George Sterling'' *''"Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain. And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy;" -Kahlil Gibran'' *''"I feel your pain the pain in knowing this has happened to you. The pain in knowing what more tears we have gained. But through all this I feel your pain," -Octavia B. Hawkins-Richardson'' *''"Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, 'It might have been." -John Greenleaf Whittier'' *''"She smiled in defeat, with unconquerable eyes." -Atticus'' *''"Whenever I climb I am followed by a dog called Ego." -Friedrich Nietzsche'' Music * Cliff Carlisle - "Goin’ Down the Road Feeling Bad" * Edna Hicks - "Poor Me Blues" * Buddy Weed and His Trio - "Whoops a Doodle" * Tedd Daffan’s Texans - "Born To Lose" * Barbecue Bob - "Poor Boy A Long Ways from Home" * Forde Ward - "I'm Going Down The Road Feeling Bad" * Gussie Ward Stone - "Going Down the Road Feeling Bad" * Leroy Carr - "Six Cold Feet in the Ground" * The Pied Pipers with Axel Stordahl and His Orchestra - "Easy Street" * Dick Haymes - "When I Grow Too Old To Dream" * Ruth Huber and Lois Judd - "Going Down the Road Felling Bad" Games Here is a partial list of games that Bennett Foddy has made: #Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy #QWOP #CLOP #GIRP #Sportsfriends #Multibowl #Plan Bee #Last Word #Zebra Category:Getting Over It Category:Developers Category:Characters